Popular 12.04 LTS Linux Distributions

LTS Enablement Stacks … to not use this: 32bit 12.04.1 DVD & 64bit 12.04.1 DVD
“In an effort to support a wider variety of hardware on an existing LTS release, the 12.04.2 and newer point releases will ship with an updated kernel and X stack by default.” … The problem is that every “new” version of Ubuntu manages to drop or depreciate support for older hardware that was supported. So I recommend using 12.04.1 for any system manufactured before 2012.

HP Linux Printing and Imaging - GUI utilities (Qt-based)
This can be needed if using an HP all-in-one Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax … especially if a proprietary driver from HP needs to be installed to get the Scanner working. Note that all GUI utilities are based on the Qt (KDE) GUI environment. There are currently no equivalent utilities based on GTK (GNOME). But thankfully this works well with other desktop environments, and does not seem to load too many package files from the KDE desktop.

GIMP 2.8 (stable) Finally Available for Download … How I upgrade to GIMP 2.8
GIMP 2.8 is the first version to support a Single Window Mode which users can choose over the default multi window mode. (This single window mode is a more familiar experience for users of other graphics packages.)

How to Batch Process Files in GIMP .. this installs many additional image processing filters
The terminal command to install the extra GIMP plugins, then use the Batch Processing tool that provides.

G'MIC - GREYC's Magic for Image Computing
“G'MIC has been made available as an easy-to-use plug-in for GIMP. It extends this retouching software capabilities by offering a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects.”

Resynthesizer Plugin
“Resynthesizer is a Gimp plug-in for texture synthesis. Given a sample of a texture, it can create more of that texture. This has a surprising number of uses.”

Shotwell 0.14.1 is Here! … useful to get then work with photos off a digital camera, etc..Note: The PPA mentioned in the above article contains 3 applications … “The Yorba PPA is maintained by the Yorba Foundation and home to the Shotwell Photo Manager, the Geary email client, and gexiv2 (a GObject wrapper for the Exiv2 metadata library).”

Install ORACLE Java 8/7/6 in Ubuntu via PPA … Ubuntu 12.04 uses OpenJDK for Java support
Install the SUN/ORACLE version of Java only if it is requried by something you want to run. (Some web development applications require this.)

YPPA manager
A simple tool that allows you to search for PPAs and install them without hitting the terminal. It also allows you to manage (add/remove/purge) your existing PPAs with a few clicks.